Insight Trails

God in the Cubicle: Sacred Ground

SHOOTS OF SNAP PEAS POPPED UP from the ground this week. Nearby the first flowers have appeared on the tomatoes. Hyacinth vines that in a few months will cast showers of purple on the side of our house, stand in a row an inch or so tall. The Irises, allium, and salvia are in bloom.

    Our garden is a small space, two patches on either side of the driveway and a border along the postage-stamp back yard. But when I step into it, even if it’s  en route somewhere else – leaving for work in the morning, for example – I feel I’m entering sacred space.

At this time of year, I’m stopped by the miracle and mystery of life springing forth. Before long, with the right mix of sun and rain, it will be wonder at ripening tomatoes, basil, string beans, rosemary, and greens.

    Over the years, I’ve come to respect that different people experience the sacred in different places and ways. For some it is entering a timeworn place of worship: a spare, simple Quaker meetinghouse with worn benches, or an ancient, spacious cathedral. For others it is in nature. One friend goes to the beach; sitting there, with the ocean stretching out before her, the waves coming in, she feels closest to God. My Dad feels it looking out onto his farm in summer, the wheat, corn, and soybeans shimmering in the breeze.

Reading the Old Testament for school this spring, though, I’ve been wondering if I’ve placed too narrow a boundary on sacred space. Encounters with the sacred can happen anywhere in scripture. Jacob is visited by God in a dream one night on his journey from Beer-sheba toward Haran (Genesis 28:12). Moses is called by God speaking through a burning bush on Mount Horeb (Exodus 3:2).

In one of his lectures, the poet David Whyte says that for him the moment of “sudden insight” for Moses – what in Zen is called “kensho,” revelation into one’s true nature – comes not when God calls to Moses, telling him to “take off your shoes, you are standing on holy ground.” (Ex 3:5: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”) Rather, it is when Moses looks down, Whyte says, and realizes “in the echo of the voice, not only was he standing on holy ground but had been for the whole of his days.”

My professor probably would call that “gap-filling.” The Old Testament does not say what goes through Moses’ mind. It’s a gap in the narrative. Moses’ first words – after God has gone on to reveal that He has heard the misery of the Israelites in their enslavement in Egypt, has “come down to deliver them” to a “land flowing with milk and honey,” and wants Moses to go to the Pharaoh to seek their release – are astonishment: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” 

But I think David Whyte makes a good point. Who is to say but that the ground  we’ve been walking on the whole of our days is holy? Rather than trying to confine sacred space, maybe we should think of it as expansive, reaching beyond our safe, predictable sacred spaces of church and nature to wherever we may be.  

Would it change how we are at work? How we are with others? How we approach tasks? Would we work harder? Do something else? Would it change how we are in the quotidian tasks of life, in the subway, the supermarket, bringing the kids to school, paying the bills? Would we be more present? More charitable? Stronger in our convictions? Would we see and hear more of the life unfolding around us and be more aligned with what Whyte calls “the particular conversation with the deity, with God and Creation, the ground itself,” that only we can have?  

Once, after reading a poem on Moses’ encounter, Whyte was approached by a rabbinical student who offered a further insight. In the original language, the student said, the word in God’s command to Moses to “take off” his shoes is “the word that is used for an animal shedding its skin.” In that moment when we have an encounter that takes us beyond ourselves, we go through “a falling away of old skins.”

We all need a “periodic molting” to reveal new possibilities, Whyte says. While that can happen stepping into the garden and being awakened anew to the mystery of new life, it can also happen at any time, anywhere, perhaps when we expect it least.

**

More on David Whyte is available at his website, http://www.davidwhyte.com/. A poem based on Moses’ encounter with God, “The Opening of Eyes,” is available on the website, http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_opening.html. Whyte’s comments on the encounter are from his lecture “Midlife and the Great Unknown.”

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Hudson Line

By Jon Berry
I recently began meditating on the commuter train into work. It wasn’t a practice I sought out. But my work situation changed and I'm working in the city again. Rather than give up starting the day with 15 minutes of silence, I decided to see if meditation is transferrable. It is.

While my preferred meditation spots are still my screen porch – where, this time of year, I can look out onto tulips, daffodils, and forsythia, and hear the whistle of birds – or a worn, wooden bench in my Quaker meeting, the “Hudson Line meditation center” carries its own, idiosyncratic benefits.

Putting down the newspaper, tuning out the Blackberry, and turning within, in the midst of a crowded train of rustling newspapers, tap-tapping keyboards, and muffled conversation, has given me a glimpse into things that are obvious to an outsider, but are easy to lose sight of when you do them every day. That I’m in motion. That I’m with other people. That, when I stop my busy-ness, I can see and hear more, and feel grounded -- even when going 60 m.p.h.

I’ve also found anew how porous the boundary is between the spiritual – that great force that breathes life into us – and the rest of life.  In the meanderings of the mind that often accompany the first phase of meditation, my mind wandered one recent morning to an upcoming business trip to California. I thought about what I planned to say in the presentations I’d be giving…then about what was most important to say…then about the issues my clients are facing…then about the human consequences of their companies' success or failure.

This led to thoughts about the people I’d be seeing…how a colleague with small children was doing, and a colleague who grew up in China under Communism and was now here and working for my company…about what a strange and wonderful world we’re living in today. I thought about whether I’d be able to visit a friend whose son has been struggling. I remembered I’d be flying over Indiana, and thought about whether my 82-year-old Dad would be out on his 50-year-old tractor on his centuries-old farm – and I smiled. Then I came back to breath, as always, after my thoughts have carried me momentarily away, and recentered into my meditation.

This idea that the spiritual is always hiding in the non-spiritual parts of our lives is what Thich Nhat Hanh is getting at in the idea that “a dandelion keeps our smile.” The most mundane parts of life, he says, can bring us into “profound communion with life.” Hanh, whom I've been reading on the ride in, writes about waiting in the airport and washing the dishes, but it could as easily be the commuter train or a staff meeting.

To Hanh, spiritual practice begins with breathing and smiling. Like the little revelations that come when we focus consciously on what we’re doing, it’s a deceptively simple idea. We all breathe. We all value moments of joy. This may seem like Buddhism Lite – something Hanh gets occasionally dismissed as. But in context of the practice of engagement in the world that the Vietnamese monk advocates – the “inter-being” that led him and other monks out of their temples during the Vietnam War to attend to the victims of bombings and strive for peace – it is the most serious of spiritual work. I love this quote from his book Peace Is Every Step:

“Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind.”

I love the words he chooses – “determination” is such a fierce word; the linking of smiles with “an awakened mind,” the decision to live in peace and joy.

If we don’t cultivate a practice of being conscious of our presence in life, the fact of life is like the wonders of the Hudson River that fly by while our noses are buried in the newspaper – there, but not there.

***

“Real strength is not in power, money or weapons but in deep, inner peace.” -- Thich Nhat Hanh

To learn more about Peace Is Every Step, or to buy a copy, please click on this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-Every-Step-Mindfulness-Everyday/dp/0553351397/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208692878&sr=8-1

For more on Thich Nhat Hanh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thich_Nhat_Hanh

http://www.plumvillage.org/

Practice: Recognizing Opportunity

By Jon Berry
IN THE 1950s, LOU CASSOTTA DECIDED TO LEAVE HIS JOB as an electrical engineer and become a psychologist. He was accepted into New York University’s Ph.D. program, and began taking classes at night as a part-time student, continuing to work during the day. He knew at some point he’d have a problem: When he started his internship, he’d have to give up his day job. His income, in turn, would drop precipitously. But he resolved to deal with that day when it came.

    “I had a feeling that, if you commit yourself to something, and you’re really open, things happen that you don’t expect,” recalls Lou (pictured above).

    And they did. One night, a friend invited him over to see her new prized possession – a radio tape recorder that she’d won in a contest. To demonstrate, she put on a tape she’d made of her therapist talking about a research project involving the new technology of computers. As Lou listened, a light bulb went off in his head: “I’m an engineer and a psychology student. I know computers. That guy’s got to want me.” He wrote a letter, the man wrote back, and within a few months, Lou was offered a position on the project. The flexible hours enabled him to go to school full-time. The project kept him on salary while he was on his internship. The work became the subject of his thesis.

    Coincidences like Lou’s are rare gifts. But many of us have had moments when, in a term from early Quakers, “way opens.” A door appears that we weren’t aware of. Such moments of recognition have been a theme in my interviews so far in Insight Trails interviews. Some of the stories sound like examples of synchronicity, Jung’s “meaningful coincidence.” But many are simply realizations that opportunity has knocked – moments of inspiration. Joe Kelly’s wife, Nancy Gruver, had such a moment when the idea for New Moon magazine sprang fully formed into her mind. George Russell had a more gradual realization of his skills as a healer when his fellow dancers started asking him to do bodywork on them, then making appointments, then giving him money.

    In an ideal world, opportunities would come to us in the form of burning bushes – preferably, a burning bush that talks to us. In their absence, we must develop a practice of learning to recognize opportunity.

A lot comes down to two ideas that Lou Cassotta intuited as a young man: commitment and openness.

    A lot, I think, comes down to two ideas that Lou intuited as a young man: commitment and openness. “If you make a bold move, it changes your life,” says Lou. “It changes your view. Things come up that you can’t foresee.” Lou, a golfer (photo), compares the phenomenon to athletes who are in “the zone”: Time slows down (an approaching baseball) so that what to do becomes clear. The athlete is simultaneously focused (“hit the ball”) and open to input that will help reach the goal (“the rotation of the seams means…curve ball”).

    To be open, we need to be able to listen. A conflict resolution manual published by the Mennonites that I read years ago said something that has always stayed with me. Listening, the book said, is more than a tool to help someone feel heard. It’s “opening ourselves to the possibility of being changed.” Meditation is, essentially, deep, transformative listening (a meditation exercise on attuning ourselves to our environment follows this essay).

    Commitment to a cause can change those around us, too. Ellen Baker’s friends helped her set up her bookkeeping business, offering encouragement, creating ads, designing her business cards, even bringing her clients. Kristen Laine says people around her took her more seriously after she began to thinking of herself as a writer. “You recognize it in someone,” says Kristen. “I think something actually, physically changes in people, in how they hold themselves, when they’re committed to a path.” 

My mom, I think, got the gist of it in one of her favorite sayings: “You make the bed you lay in.”

Mom Was Right. Those who have read or seen the New Age best-seller The Secret might call “opportunity knocks” moments examples of the law of attraction – you attract what you think. But the idea is much older and more widespread. It’s the Hindu concept of karma – our actions create our fate. It’s in the phrase Ellen Baker heard in 12-step meetings: “You get back what you put out.” A lot of practical, common-sense advice passed down from generation to generation is about the messages we send to the world.

    My mom, I think, got the gist of it in one of her favorite sayings: “You make the bed you lay in.” As a kid, I used to chafe at the notion: What about all the children born into poverty? Did they make that bed? But my parents, who grew up in the Great Depression, saw a gritty truth in it and a corollary saying my Mom also invoked, “You make your heaven and hell on earth.” To them, being focused, resourceful, and mindful of others – “keep your eye on the ball,” “make hay while the sun shines,” and remember the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), in other sayings of their day – increase your chances of getting the life you want. If we want a meaningful life, we need to put our thoughts and actions into creating a meaningful life.

    My dad’s parents are legendary in our family for their resourcefulness. Grandpa Don learned to repair his farm equipment; this, in turn, got him work repairing machines in the factories in town. When rural electrification came, he wired many of the farms in the area. He knew plumbing, built houses, and was barber to local kids. My grandpa and Grandma Clara, with their four sons, raised much of their own food. They cured their own ham.

 Their ingenuity was in service of what meant most to them: their family and farm. At a time when many Americans lost their farms, my grandparents held onto theirs – “the little place,” as they called it – throughout the Depression. When prosperity returned in the 1950s, they parlayed it into a larger farm on better ground up the road. That farm remains in our family (photos). Whether my grandparents “attracted” abundance, or were following a maxim of their day (“God helps those who help themselves”) is, to me, semantics. They were committed and open to what life presented.

That’s I.T.

“5-4-3-2-1 meditation.” This is a great exercise for tuning in and opening up to the world around us. I learned it in a workshop led by Arizona psychologist John Dore. Start by closing your eyes in meditation. Keep them closed for several minutes. When you open your eyes, make a mental list of five things you see; five things you hear; and five things you’re feeling. Then close your eyes for several minutes; open them, and tick off four things you see; four things you hear; and four things you’re feeling. Close your eyes and repeat the exercise for three things you see, hear, and feel; then two; then one. I’ve tried this meditation to start the day, and before writing, speeches, and important meetings – and think I’ve just tapped the surface of its potential. 

To read the following Insight Trails interviews, click on the links below:

Ellen Baker

http://www.insighttrails.com/blog/2008/01/qa-ellen-baker.html

Joe Kelly

http://www.insighttrails.com/blog/2007/09/qa-joe-kelly-da.html

Kristen Laine

http://www.insighttrails.com/blog/2007/11/qa-kristen-lain.html

George Russell

http://www.insighttrails.com/blog/2007/10/dr-george-russe.html

 

Practice: Cultivating Silence

By Jon Berry
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG, ASPIRING NEWSPAPER REPORTER, a gruff, old journalist taught me something I never forgot. It wasn’t about writing a lede, developing sources, or other tools of the trade. It was the importance of cultivating silence.

    Whenever he hit a wall in a story or in life, the journalist went off to a corner of his house where he wouldn’t be disturbed, lit a candle, and spent a half-hour in complete quiet. He always came back, he said, with a new perspective.

    A business executive once expressed the same idea in a different way to a friend of mine. “Everyone,” he said, “needs some ceiling time.” He meant that everyone, even busy executives, needs time to meditate. His own daily meditation was to gaze up at the ceiling – the one space in his office that didn’t carry a reminder of work.

    Silence can be uncomfortable. We’ve all had the experience of being asked to observe a moment of silence in a ballgame, dinner, or meeting, when the leader leaps onto the next sentence before the word “silence” has barely been said. We live in a culture of taking action. Slowing down is disruptive. It’s disturbing.

    And it leads to good things. I see it in the people I’ve interviewed so far for Insight Trails. They practice it in different ways – walks in the woods, meditation, prayer, quieting down in religious or spiritual setting. But all have silence as part of their life.

   I experience the power of cultivating silence in the spiritual communities that I’m part of. In the Quaker meeting I go to on Sunday mornings, the hour of silence yields insights, connections, and a sense of calm unlike anything in my day-to-day life.

   I’ve opened meetings in non-spiritual settings – including workplaces – with a brief silence. Sometimes it’s a minute. Mostly it’s just one or two full, deep breaths. I don’t identify the request as spiritual as such – saying instead something like, “first, let’s take a deep breath and think about what we want from this meeting…” This moment of reflection can do wonders for focusing the group’s attention.

    Early Quakers identified the experience of discomfort that we have in silence as the first step in spiritual awakening. They believed that we all have within us an “Inward Light” that impels us toward truth, including uncomfortable truths. The experience brings us fresh points of view and deeper perspectives – in Friends’ terms, closer to God. Within it is the potential to transform, refresh, and heal.

    How does one begin? Recent readings have deepened my appreciation of the process of Quaker silence. Taking these books and pamphlets together, certain themes come through:

    Center Down. This old Quaker term literally means what it says. Quaker worship begins with turning inward, to our center, and focusing down, to get out of our heads. The goal, says J. Brant Bill in Holy Silence, a good, book-length primer on Quaker worship, is to “create a space for God to work within us.” It’s not easy. Cares of the week bubble up. Sounds crowd in – someone coughing, cars going by, children whispering. Some Friends respond by returning to centering down. Others turn the disruptions into prayer – reminders to pray for people’s health, safe travels, and children – “pray the distractions directly into the prayer,” as Douglas Steere puts it in his pamphlet Friends and Worship.

    Deeper Silence. At a certain point, the busyness gives way to a deeper quiet. Bill puts it nicely. Having “cast off from the shore” and made our way “around the edge of the spiritual sea,” we are drawn to “launch out to the depths,” to a place that is “deeper spiritually” and “higher emotionally” than “any place we normally live.” The busyness of the first phase of centering drifts away. It’s as if we’ve stepped outside time.

    Opening up. In this deeper silence, things happen. Life opens up. The controls that we clamp onto day-to-day life – that often keep us from experiencing life – fade away. Some people experience a welling up of gratitude that isn’t accessible to them in everyday experience, from the divine mystery of life to simple beauties around them – birds at the birdfeeder, children on the playground, bicyclists going by.

 Answers. Early Quakers found another, important thing occurred in this deeper state: Answers came to them. Many times they were elusive – an image, a feeling, or a snippet of a phrase. But they resonated as true.

    Rex Ambler, who recreated the process of early Friends’ worship experience in his brief book Light to Live by, writes about the words “be real” coming “out of the blue” to him while meditating on a troubled relationship. He “understood immediately,” he writes, that he had “been acting a part” in his life, with the result that he didn’t know himself or how to be in a relationship. It would take courage and acceptance, but – if he could be true to himself – he had a way through his problem.

    This notion of letting in answers separates the Quakers from other kinds of meditation that emphasize continual letting go. The concept has been integrated into therapeutic practice. “Focusing,” a six-step technique developed by Eugene Gendlin, a psychologist who attended Quaker meetings as a child, is premised on the idea that truth resides in each of us (as opposed to an external authority); that this truth can be experienced; and that it often lies deeper than words or other symbolic expressions. Our inner truths often have corollaries in our bodies – “felt senses” in the chest, gut, or elsewhere. Focusing doesn’t solve the problem. But, in the words of one writer, it can lead to “the beginnings of clarity about changes I need to make in my life.”

    These moments of clarity can also be accompanied by physical effects – sighs, tears, deep feelings of relief. I’ve seen all of these, as well, in Friends’ Meetings for Worship.

 Transformation. Cultivating a practice of sailing into the deep waters of silence, and listening to the deeper truths available there, can be risky business. Early Friends describe being “ripped apart” by the experience. But they also found that opening themselves up in silence changed them in powerful ways. Exposing the old, uncomfortable truths, says Ambler, can lead to “the birth of a new, truer self.” 

    This transformation can spur further changes. It sends us back into the world with a new energy. It’s the underlying idea, I believe, in the often-quoted line from William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) that “true goodliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.” It keeps us focused on the big picture and big questions, forcing us, as Bill says, to ask “what does God want?” rather than “our usual ‘what do I want?’” It helps us be with others; a deep, shared silence can be more helpful than any words to a friend in need of comfort. It gives us “strength and power to allay all storms and tempests,” in the words of George Fox, the early leader of Quakerism. Done communally, as in Friends Meetings, it can harmonize us with those around us and open us to wisdom that others possess. Fox counseled his followers to always “carry around some quiet inside thee.”

    Early Friends considered silence to be a direct path to God, the Christ Within. This was a radical idea in its time. Giving up dependence on doctrines, rituals, preachers, and the other accoutrements of the church, and turning inward to find the Eternal, put the Quakers at odds with the establishment.

    Silence remains a radical idea today. In our culture of Blackberries, cell phones, the Internet, high-definition televisions, and continual bombardment of advertising, cultivating silence – as opposed to consuming products – is a radical idea. But it can connect us to – and keep us on – the path we’re supposed to be on.

That’s I.T.
 
J. Brent Bill’s book Holy Silence is a fine introduction to Quaker practice, with guidelines for starting an individual practice or going to a Quaker meeting. For more information, visit Brent’s website:
http://www.brentbill.com/
To purchase a copy of Holy Silence, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1557254206/qid=1113445622/sr=8-6/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i6_xgl14/103-6882526-5818259?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 

Rex Ambler’s great little book Light to Live by chronicles Ambler’s study of early Friends’ approach and step-by-step distillation of it for individual and group meditations.  To purchase a copy, click here:
http://www.quakerbooks.org/search

To read Douglas Steere’s Friends and Worship, a classic introduction to Quaker meeting, please click on this link:
http://www.fgcquaker.org/library/welcome/fa-worship.html

 Nancy Saunders’ article “Focusing on the Light: A Modest Proposal,” is a good introduction to Eugene Gendlin’s technique of Focusing and its links to Quakerism: http://www.focusing.org/focusing_on_the_light.html

For more information on Focusing, click on this link:
http://www.focusing.org/

The website Quakerfinder can help you find a Friends meeting near you:
http://www.quakerfinder.org/

Friends Journal is an excellent resource for learning more about contemporary Quakerism (full disclosure: I serve on the board of this publication, in addition to being a big fan of it.):
http://www.friendsjournal.org/

The image of the Quaker meetinghouse is of Live Oaks Meeting in Houston, Tx. The meeting room features a "skyspace" ceiling window that opens to the sky. For more, see:  http://www.friendshouston.org/